News from the School

Nest Box Camera

A Blue Tit checks out our nest box.

The school have setup a nest box with an integrated camera to try and entice some birds to nest there so we can watch and study the life process. The camera we bought was from Handykam.com, and included a pine nest box and all the wires we needed to connect to a PC.

For this we decided in keeping with our green policy to purchase a Raspberry Pi 3 and stream from that using Motion Software. Well this isn’t strictly true, what we did do was install Raspbian and then added motion to that. We also had to mess around a little to get the USB capture device to work on the Pi but we will add a tutorial later for anyone who may want to go the same route as an easy follow guide.

Anyway the upshot is this enables us to have an always on, very low powered device and so save energy.

So far we don’t have a nest in there yet but we do have regular Blue Tits pinching our bedding! Here is a video of such an occurrence.